Outbreak Company: Volume 2

by Ichiro Sakaki

  On top of that, even if the JSDF managed to get over here secretly, there remained the question of whether they could actually win. Sure, we’ve got movies like G.I. Samurai, but the truth is, we couldn’t be certain that modern military equipment would have the advantage. Modern military history provides more examples of numbers overcoming a technologically superior force than I could name.

  Then there was the little fact that people in this world could use magic. The Japanese side hadn’t yet figured out what principal this magic operated on. There was always a certain possibility that the actual laws of physics were different in the Eldant Empire than they were in Japan, and we simply hadn’t realized it yet. The JSDF’s weapons involved a lot of electricity and sheer physical mass, so in a world that had different laws of physics, weapons might malfunction in exciting new ways, right when we least wanted them to.

  For what it was worth, the armored personnel carrier seemed to be running smoothly—but I supposed the engineers would be left shaking their heads if anyone tried to tell them it was really fire sprites doing the work over here.

  Another thing we didn’t know was how powerful military magic was around here. You couldn’t discount the possibility that someone would just shout “Abracadabra!” and turn the whole army into frogs.

  In light of all this, the Japanese government hit on a better plan: cultural invasion.

  Once upon a time, Christian missionaries—along with narcotics—were used as the tip of the spear wherever there was to be an invasion.

  Religion is a powerful brainwashing device. Even if the founders and their immediate disciples didn’t intend it—in fact, probably never imagined their teachings being used that way—a religion’s power to bind people together can become the basis for large-scale rebellions and wars, as history teaches. You can use it to destroy an enemy country from the inside without ever firing a shot.

  At the moment, though, Japan had no really “addictive” religion. Buddhism and Shinto have become a sort of transparent part of people’s lives precisely by softening their own most powerful characteristics—and on the other end of the spectrum, the various “new religions,” which undoubtedly do have an “addictive” quality, would probably be downright dangerous if deployed by the government. One wrong move, and Japan could have a hostile country right next door with nothing but a hyperspace portal for a border.

  So the question arose: was there something similar to drugs or religion, but easier to control?

  As it happened, otaku culture fit the bill. And the idiot otaku who wandered right into the government’s clutches was... me.

  “Dammit...”

  This whole situation was like a rock that had started to roll down a hill. Even if I quit, they would just bring in the next oblivious nerd—and maybe it would be someone without any compunctions about invading another world.

  That meant there wasn’t much I could do to thwart the plans I was now a part of. I would simply be “dealt with,” as Matoba-san had put it.

  What to do, what to do?

  Should I pretend I hadn’t noticed anything? Yes, this was an invasion, but not exactly the way they did it back in the Middle Ages. The Japanese government didn’t intend to conquer the Eldant Empire, massacre its people, and make slaves of the survivors or anything wildly inhuman like that.

  Well, wait... Didn’t they?

  I highly doubted that the Japanese government would endorse traditional slavery, but there was no question that a system of exploitation would emerge. It would cause the gap between rich and poor to widen, further exacerbating the Eldant Empire’s already class-conscious society: the people who were already starving would starve worse, while the small minority that was the ruling class would tighten their grip. You don’t even have to look as far as our—ahem—neighbor to the north. The pattern seemed likely to be the same no matter what world you were in.

  I stood there, not making a sound. I felt like I was in some kind of nightmare, one of those pain-in-the-ass ones that refuses to end. I rubbed my eyes, then stared at my palms. But there was no escaping it: I wasn’t going to wake up, because this nightmare was my reality.

  As I was thinking these gloomy thoughts, someone tapped me on the shoulder. I looked up with a start to see a handsome, silver-haired guy frowning at me. It was the knight, Garius. An important young mover and shaker in the Eldant Empire, he was a minister as well as a knight.

  “How very melancholy you look,” he said. “What troubles you, Shinichi?”

  “Oh, uh, you know. Just things...” I said evasively. I was definitely not about to explain to him of all people that I was among the first elements of an invasion intended to gain a foothold in his world.

  I looked at the ground, feeling too sick to meet his eyes. If our gazes met, I was sure he would suspect me—but I didn’t have much choice.

  “Hm?” he murmured.

  Despite the fact that I was staring at my feet, I could sense that Garius was looking at me doubtfully. I hoped he would be content to leave it at that and go away, but if that were the case, he wouldn’t have started talking to me to begin with.

  The air was full of the warm sunlight of early afternoon. You could tell a ruler lived here at Eldant Castle, because everything beyond the railing of the marble terrace we were on looked like a giant nature reserve. I leaned against the railing, an oppressive feeling settling over me. Still I didn’t speak.

  I peeked back over my shoulder at the terrace behind me. A short distance away there was a table, the legs fashioned to look like cat’s paws, laden with silver trays bearing bite-sized cakes. Petralka was sitting there, enjoying her afternoon tea. Myusel and Minori-san were with her, and Minori-san and Petralka were trying to talk down Myusel, who was insisting on serving them.

  The scene was almost peaceful enough to bring a smile to my face. And yet, sitting there together were the invader and the invaded. And the people who were being invaded didn’t even know it yet. If Petralka or Myusel knew the truth—knew what the Japanese government was really planning—what would they think? The sight of their little tea party looked so precarious to me, like a house built on sand.

  “Shinichi?” The voice that brought me back to reality was again that of Garius, who was still standing in front of me. He wasn’t looking at me, though. He had his eyes on Petralka and the others just like I did.

  “I believe you spoke to me once of the ‘knightly virtues,’” he said.

  “Huh? Oh... Yeah.” That conversation seemed so long ago now; his reference brought me up short. Thinking back on it, I realized how arrogant I must have sounded—me, who was nothing more than an agent of some invaders.

  “I think it could be, Shinichi, that this culture you’re bringing us will undermine our own long-standing traditions.”

  I almost choked, but Garius either didn’t mind or didn’t notice, because he went right on.

  “I am a knight of the Eldant Empire; myself and others all esteem me as such. I know the knight’s principles, and... Well, I believed I was living them. But I found the knights depicted in the manga you brought to be shocking. To be precise, I suppose I should say the knights in the manga Her Highness read aloud to me. ‘This is what it means to be a knight,’ she said. Tell me... is that truly how knights in your country are?”

  “Well, uh...”

  The truth was, things like the knightly virtues and bushido were post-hoc creations, developed in times of peace, to help take ruffians whose talents were only useful in war and turn them into members of a less violent society. These codes were, in their own way, tools of political brainwashing, not anything born of necessity...

  “I was angry, at first,” Garius said. “I felt you were dismissing knighthood as it had been passed down to us through the generations. I suppose that’s still true.” He didn’t sound as upset as his words suggested. “But of late, I sometimes feel... Let’s say it feels as if I’ve been defeated.”

  “Wha...?”

  A lot of fantas
y stories involving knights are morality plays. It may seem obvious, but we see them defeating the strong and defending the weak, and it looks heroic to us. We hold them up as ideals, people who fight for what they believe in even when it seems ridiculous to do so. What did Garius, who was a real, actual knight, make of that?

  And what did he mean by defeated? Did he feel he had lost to the idealized image of a knight from some other world? If that was true, he must have found it immensely embarrassing.

  I remained silent; Garius made a little motion with his chin.

  “In all my life, I’ve never seen anything quite like that,” he said. He was indicating Petralka, sitting happily in the sun. Myusel, sitting across from her, was smiling kindly, and Minori-san seemed to be enjoying herself, too. There were maids besides Myusel there to serve—but even they, standing against the wall, seemed somehow happy, swept up in the pleasant atmosphere.

  “Her Majesty—Petralka...” Garius said to me, almost whispering. “She was so young when her parents died. Politics... Everyone poisoned everyone else in a dispute over the succession, if you can believe it. The previous Majesty was deeply distraught, passing from grief just a year later. That’s how Petralka ended up on the throne at such a young age.”

  I couldn’t say anything. For someone to be an empress when she was still practically young enough to be called a child—I knew there had to be some kind of story there, but even I hadn’t realized...

  Wait. Hold on a second.

  If they were disputing the succession, that meant...

  “Yes,” Garius said with a grim smile, as if he had read my thoughts. “The ones who poisoned Petralka’s parents were my own parents.”

  The shock must have been clear on my face.

  “Petralka inherited the throne because—well, of course, she’s ostensibly first in line for the succession. The reality is, though, that it was the product of a compromise between the factions who supported the First Prince and the Second Prince, in order that they might not simply destroy each other. Petralka could be put forth as putative empress, with myself as regent, and both factions could continue to exist.”

  “But that would mean...”

  That would mean Petralka was a puppet ruler, no more than an ornament on the throne.

  “Of course, Petralka herself is aware of that much. That’s precisely why she works so hard to appear suitably imperial. She knows that her own parents, as well as her aunt and uncle, died by poison, and she’s quite keen that such a thing not happen again. So she does her duty as empress with as much fanfare as she can muster. At the same time, it appears she’s been quite considerate toward me, as well.”

  “Petralka did all that...?”

  I hadn’t had any idea of the sort of position she was in. Now that I thought about it, though, it struck me that a true child empress would be unusual; that her presence pointed to some covert structure of power.

  “Thus it was only after our parents’ deaths that I ever saw my cousin, Petralka, smile in a way befitting a girl of her age.”

  I was speechless. I didn’t know what exactly it looked like to Garius, but he smiled, a bit sadly.

  “Petralka has had favorite ministers, but no one she could rightly call a friend. Someone and something has finally arrived that she can truly admit into her heart. That is you, and the culture you’ve brought.”

  I never expected him to say it so frankly.

  Without any pretense, he said, “I thank you.”

  Could it be... Could it be that even this handsome knight had days that he simply wanted to be a friendly older cousin for Petralka?

  “But...” I began, but as I expected, I couldn’t bring myself to go further.

  But that was just... coincidence.

  The otaku culture I’d brought—it was supposed to be a tool of invasion.

  “I don’t know precisely what worries you, Shinichi,” Garius said, “but you may hold your head high. So far from being as weak as I took you for, you have saved Her Majesty.”

  Then he turned and began to walk away, toward the table where the girls were having tea; he no doubt intended to join the conversation. As I watched him go—as you might guess—all I could do was sigh.

  Hold my head high? As if.

  Minori-san stood up on the pretext of offering Garius her seat and came up to me. She was glancing back and forth between me and Garius, smirking.

  “Shinichi-kun,” she whispered in my ear as she came up beside me. “You two were looking awfully friendly. I don’t think anyone could have gotten between you if they’d wanted to.”

  She sounded like a schoolgirl trying to wheedle some sweet little love story out of her classmate.

  “No we weren’t! Yes they could have!” I said, my voice on the edge of a shout. “This whole BL, yaoi, whatever... thing that you’re hoping for, it’s not going to happen!”

  “Oooh. Methinks he doth protest too much!” she said.

  This woman...

  “Minori-san,” I said, suddenly changing my tone. “If... If I said I wanted to quit, what would happen?”

  It took a moment for her to respond.

  “At the very least... I think you’d better not say anything like that in front of Bureau Chief Matoba.” She was looking at me very seriously. “Unfortunately, you already know what you are and what you’re here for. And I’m pretty sure your beloved manga and anime and light novels have given you an idea of what governments do with people who know too much.”

  “That’s... That’s true.” I knew, all right. That was why I was so damn depressed.

  At that exact moment—you couldn’t have scripted it better—we heard Petralka talking.

  “Mm. Otaku culture is quite a good thing. It broadens one’s views and enlarges one’s world! I believe we shall make it part of the foundational curriculum for noble education going forward. Perhaps we can gradually give the commoners opportunities to study it as well. In fact, I believe our political and judiciary systems could benefit from the philosophies set forth in otaku culture—”

  “No! You can’t!” I shouted, almost reflexively.

  That killed the mood on the terrace. I had shattered the peace that had reigned until just a moment ago. Now there was an unsettling tension in the air instead.

  Petralka and Myusel were both wide-eyed with surprise, Garius was looking at me questioningly, and the maids seemed downright terrified.

  “Why not?” Petralka asked, knitting her brow. “Is there some problem? Shinichi, what moves you to say such a thing?”

  I didn’t answer. How could I possibly?

  “Shinichi... are you not the evangelist of otaku culture?”

  “Well...”

  I had been convinced I was simply bringing otaku culture to this world. Just anime and manga and light novels and games. Nothing more than that, nothing more meaningful than that. As much as I, an otaku myself, loved all those things, I had mistaken their power.

  If you take too much medicine, it can be poisonous. If somebody takes medicine they’re not used to, that can be poisonous, too. To a place with an underdeveloped entertainment culture like the Eldant Empire, otaku culture turned out to be far more insidious than I had realized, and it was spreading fast. It was like a bioweapon, and the contagion was on the move. This was a cultural “outbreak.”

  Changes as sudden and dramatic as this, of course, are bound to create friction. Some of them might lead to good things, like the friendship between Petralka and Myusel. There was no question of that. But at the same time, there was just as much possibility that they would create problems.

  Destruction was, after all, destruction. Cracks would appear in traditional systems and ideals, and in the attempt to maintain internal consistency, logic would eventually fail. In an extreme scenario, abruptly introducing otaku culture, created as it was in a world of freedom and equality, to a socially stratified empire could practically inspire a rebellion against the state.

  There are plenty of examples wh
ere the internet spread in countries in which the government formerly kept a tight leash on information, the state found it was no longer able to repress the populace, and the system crumbled.

  What if something similar occurred in the Eldant Empire? What would happen to Petralka? The existing social system would turn to rubble. Power would be held in name only, institutions no longer able to function. Rebellion would break out, and the nation wouldn’t be able to continue under its current legal system.

  Wasn’t that exactly what the Japanese government wanted?

  Or was I overthinking it? Was all this just an ugly flight of fancy?

  I would be so, so happy if it were.

  “Shinichi?” Petralka was looking at me with concern. But I didn’t have it in me to answer.

  How much of what I was doing was invasion, and how much was enlightenment?

  Was it really right to bring in ideas like freedom and equality?

  I groaned, lost in a philosophical maze I saw no way out of.

  A weary voice came from the other side of the door: “I was afraid he might end up like this one day.”

  Maybe they were deliberately speaking loudly enough for me to hear them. Then again, you could hear what was going on from pretty much anywhere in the house, despite the overall high quality of the construction. I didn’t know if it was a problem with architectural technology or what, but most buildings in the Eldant Empire seemed to have poor sealing and soundproofing.

  Regardless. I was slumped down, leaning my back against the door to my office. In a way, it was strangely familiar—this was how I had spent much of my time as a home security guard.

  The door was locked, but there was a chance that Myusel or Brooke had matching keys, so I had tied the doorknob securely to one of the candleholders on the wall with a piece of string. I guess if Minori-san or someone got really serious, it would still be easy enough to break in.